Wikepedia (abridged): Eight Songs for a Mad King is a monodrama by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies with a libretto by Randolph Stow based on words of George III, written for the South-African actor Roy Hart and the composer's ensemble the Pierrot Players and premiered April 22, 1969.Lasting half an hour, it is scored for a baritone with an extraordinary command of extended techniques covering more than five octaves, and six players: flute (doubling piccolo), clarinet, percussion: railway whistle/Snare drum/ 2 susp.cymbals /foot cyms/ 2 wood blocks / Bass drum/chains/ratchet/tom-toms/tamtam/tambourine/rototoms/toy bird-calls/2tpl.bl/ wind chimes/crotales/sleigh bells/glockenspiel/steel bars/crow/ didgeridoo, piano (doubling harpsichord & dulcimer) and violin cello. The cover shows a famous excerpt in which the staves are arranged in the shape of a birdcage's bars. The eight songs are all based on the tunes played by an actual mechanical organ owned by George III which he used to try and train bullfinches to sing. The action unfolds as a soliloquy by the king, the players being placed on stage in large birdcages, and culminates in his snatching and smashing a violin. Other exponents of this work have included the American baritone William Pearson, Michael Rippon, Thomas Meglioranza and Julius Eastman. Briton Richard Suart has performed the piece in Gelsenkirchen"š Milan"š Helsinki"š Strasbourg"š Stavanger and Paris and Olle Persson, famous Swedish baritone in Stockholm in the 1990s. In 1987, The Musical Times described Britons performance as "compelling from start to finish". Davies was born in Salford, Lancashire, the son of Thomas and Hilda Davies.[2] He took piano lessons and composed from an early age. After education at Leigh Boys Grammar School, Davies studied at the University of Manchester and at the Royal Manchester College of Music (amalgamated into the Royal Northern College of Music in 1973), where his fellow students included Harrison Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr, Elgar Howarth and John Ogdon. Together they formed New Music Manchester, a group committed to contemporary music. After graduating in 1956, he studied on an Italian government scholarship for a year with Goffredo Petrassi in Rome before working as Director of Music at Cirencester Grammar School from 1959 to 1962.In 1962, he secured a Harkness Fellowship at Princeton University, with the help of Aaron Copland and Benjamin Britten,[4] where he studied with Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt and Earl Kim. He then moved to Australia, where he was Composer in Residence at the Elder Conservatorium of Music, University of Adelaide from 1965-66.Davies was one of the first classical composers to open a music download website, MaxOpus, (in 1996). The site became temporarily unavailable after the arrest in June 2007 of Michael Arnold (one of MaxOpus's directors) on fraud charges arising from money missing from Davies's business accounts. In October 2008 Arnold and his wife Judith (Davies' former agent) were charged with the theft of almost £450,000. In November 2009, Michael Arnold was sentenced to 18 months in jail.[9] Maxopus.com was relaunched earlier in 2009.Davies was known as an 'enfant terrible' of the 1960s, whose music frequently shocked audiences and critics. One of the last of his overtly theatrical and shocking pieces was Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969), in which he utilised 'musical parody' by taking a canonical piece of music, Handel's Messiah, and subverting it to suit his own needs.Davies has a keen interest in environmentalism. He wrote The Yellow Cake Revue, a collection of cabaret-style pieces that he performed with actress Eleanor Bron, in protest at plans to mine uranium ore in Orkney. It is from this suite of pieces that his famous instrumental chanson triste interlude Farewell to Stromness is taken. The slow, walking bass line that pervades the Farewell portrays the residents of the village of Stromness having to leave their homes as a result of uranium contamination. The Revue was first performed at the St. Magnus Festival, in Orkney, by Bron, with the composer at the piano, in June 1980. Stromness, the second largest town in Orkney, would have been two miles from the uranium mine's core, and the center most threatened by pollution, had the proposed development been approved.Davies is known for his use of magic squares as a source of musical materials and as a structural determinant. In his work Ave Maris Stella (1975) he used a 9x9 square numerologically associated with the moon, reduced modulo 9 to produce a Latin square, to permute the notes of a plainsong melody with the same name as the piece and to govern the durations of the notes.[citation needed]Worldes Blis (1969) indicated a move towards a more integrated and somewhat more restrained style, anticipating the calm which Davies would soon find at his new home in Orkney. Some have drawn a comparison[weasel words] between this later style and the music of Jean Sibelius. His present style is regarded as much more accessible, to the point where Harrison Birtwistle no longer regarded him as a modernist. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.